HALLOWEEN ENDS: The Trilogy Was Always Headed Here
Love it or hate it, the concluding chapter of the latest Halloween series sticks to the landing.
It’s hard to describe what a big deal Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers was upon release in 1988. Everyone seemed to be talking about this movie: Local news did a segment. A morning zookeeper proclaimed the best part being “when the girl gets impaled with the barrel of a shotgun.” My brother’s then-girlfriend talked excitedly of seeing it, and even my teacher (!) gave us a non-graphic rundown after my friends and I spent one morning pestering him for spoilers.
Everyone was glad that Michael Myers had returned, though one aspect of Halloween 4 dominated the conversation. Not just in the days and weeks after release, but for a calendar year. That’s the hook ending where Michael is seemingly dead and buried and his niece, Jamie, so terribly traumatized by The Shape’s murderous intentions, stabs her mother to death.
Or so it seemed.
The ending shot, among the most memorable and chilling in the series, shows little Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris) standing at the top of the stairs before a crowd of shell-shocked onlookers, breathing like Michael while a hysterical Loomis realizes evil never dies in Haddonfield.
“How’s the next one going to work?” I wondered.
“His niece is taking over for him,” my friends answered.
I thought about how the logistics of an eight-year-old girl becoming The Next Shape might unfold. Jamie isn’t Michael. She can’t overpower her victims. What is she going to do? Slice up a few bullies in school? Duct tape an abusive step parent to a recliner before stabbing him to death? How far away from its central conceit can a sequel go while maintaining the legacy of Michael Myers?
My circle of ten-year-old friends and I speculated for the rest of 1988 and well into 1989. It may seem naive to think anyone seriously believed the filmmakers had killed off Michael Myers, but we did. You have to remember that there was already one Halloween movie that decade that had gone so far as to discard him entirely. How were we supposed to know the producers wouldn’t try something like that again?
“How’s it all going to work?”
An intriguing question. And sometime in the late summer of 1989, I got an answer. A glimpse of the poster for the fifth installment—Halloween 5—hanging in the theater lobby. The tagline at the top screaming: MICHAEL LIVES. AND THIS TIME THEY'RE READY.
“So much for that,” I remember thinking.
Not a complaint. I was a kid and thrilled to have the boogeyman back, though a small part of me was disappointed because I was being denied the movie I had spent the better part of a year wondering about. All the curiosity I had cultivated for that alternate sequel—about a murderous niece possessed with her uncle’s evil—would go forever unexplored.
Bummer.
Only… Those logistical questions never left my brain. They nested there, fading further with the release of every Halloween sequel and remake, but never fully waning
A funny thing happened this past October in the weeks leading up to the release of Halloween Ends, the concluding chapter of director David Gordon Green’s trilogy. That long-dormant question returned. And just like Laurie Strode in Halloween (2018), I realized I had been waiting for it.
Corey Takes Shape
Halloween Ends is withholding from the jump. Its opening scene showcases all the expected elements this type of film requires: a babysitter, an old dark house, a missing butcher knife, but it’s all misdirection. Michael Myers is a no show and the intro is a summation of the movie as a whole. Green telling us that he’s keeping his star player off the field, even though The Shape’s presence will be felt every step of the way.
Nearly thirty-five years after I first contemplated the hows and whys of another killer assuming Michael’s mantle, Halloween Ends was finally answering my question. I was going to see how one creative team would make it work.
This is unlike anything the franchise has attempted. Rather than hitting the reset button for another round of slasher carnage (for example: let’s see what Allyson is up to today and look at all the new friends she’s made—all of whom are about to have a terrible Halloween), we get something closer to a character study. An up-close and personal look at our ill-fated babysitter Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), who turns out to be Michael’s latest—and most unconventional—victim.
Calling Corey a victim might sound like a misnomer, but Green’s trilogy is fascinated by the residual harm Michael inflicts on Haddonfield and Corey is the most thorough examination of this interest.
He doesn’t die at the hands of The Shape. His fate is arguably worse. He’s hollowed out like a jack o’ lantern, his humanity peeled away and replaced by a festering evil that proceeds to infect every part of him.
This “hard right turn” might seem at first like an abrupt departure for not only Green’s trilogy, but the Halloween series writ large. Only the concept of Corey being subsumed by a contagious evil is consistent with much of what Green’s previous Halloween films were about. Furthermore, it’s faithful to the larger series periphery, exploring concepts never brought into explicit focus before now.
Whether it’s the aforementioned trauma of Jamie Lloyd or the entirety of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), where a sinister doctor and a secret cult are motivated by the gruesome lure of the infamous Thorn curse, these tertiary elements have been persistent for decades and one of the best things that David Gordon Green does with his entries is locate opportunities to expand on them.
Building Blocks
Green’s three Halloween movies have their own unique identities. This causes some to believe they are not well-conceived as a whole, but each one serves as an ideal building block for the next, and when you look back at how they began, it’s easy to see how we ended up where we did.
Halloween (2018) gives us the big Michael and Laurie rematch, and it does so by inverting much of John Carpenter’s original film to show that Laurie has become the hunter. The one patiently waiting for her prey, jumping into action on the big night and triumphing over evil, leaving Michael burnt to a crisp.
Halloween Kills becomes Michael’s movie. The Terminator 2 of slasher pictures, owning a huge scope and scale of slaughter and chaos that culminates in a victory for the bad guy. Each part of a trilogy should serve its own purpose, and Halloween Kills ends with Laurie’s realization that Michael cannot be beaten by blunt force. That her trap in the last movie was a waste of time. She thew everything she had at Michael and only managed to make things worse. All that’s waiting for her at the end of this road is her own death.
Together, these two movies serve as the climax of Laurie’s story. Halloween Ends is the epilogue.
Like Lt. Kinderman at the end of Exorcist III, Laurie comes to understand that evil will always exist. This realization is illustrated though Michael’s victory over Tommy Doyle and the lynch mob. Evil actions can never defeat evil. It’s also why Laurie’s daughter Karen (Judy Greer) falls victim to The Shape in the closing moments of Halloween Kills. She might’ve been a voice of reason throughout the film, keeping her humanity intact and inspiring others to do the same, but in the end she utilizes the mob to her advantage and ultimately that anger is her undoing.
Karen isn’t wrong, but her rage gives Michael what he needs.
In the wake of Karen’s death, Laurie finds her moment of clarity and abstains from the fight, choosing instead to live “with love and trust.” The evolution of Laurie in Halloween Ends is both delicate and earned. The courage she demonstrates in leaving The Shape behind for the first time in 40+ years is the strongest she’s ever been.
She’s also right.
Similar to Nancy at the end of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, Laurie turns her back on evil to deny The Shape his power. All of the Halloween Kills survivors do, perhaps in recognition of the self-destructive path they were on. When Halloween Ends comes around, it isn’t just Laurie who has moved on, but Allyson, Lindsay, and Hawkins too.
No more living in fear. No more searching the shadows on Halloween night for knife-wielding killers.
This is a problem for Michael, who needs their misery. Halloween Kills established him as a sort of parasite who gets stronger with each murder, emboldened by not only the death he causes, but the residual fear and anger that his killings create. This fear is the true source of his power (he is the boogeyman, after all) and without it, he’s nothing.
It’s why Halloween Ends finds him barely existing at all, rotting away in a sewer, reduced to snatching homeless people whenever they get too close to the drain pipe. He’s still there, but barely. Without the town’s proverbial fear as his battery, it’s only a matter of time until he’s drained.
Residual Evils
Instead, the crux of Halloween Ends is about how Michael’s evil corrupts. And that’s present all the way back in Halloween (2018).
It’s showcased there through Dr. Ranbir Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), the psychiatrist who took over treatment of Michael once Dr. Loomis passed away. Halfway through Halloween (2018) it’s revealed that Sartain is a villain, influenced by Michael’s unrepentant evil. His singular obsession is the need to observe the killer “in the wild,” in the hope he might finally understand it.
This desire drives Sartain off the deep end, obsessively prepared to do whatever it takes to satisfy his twisted goals. The cause of the bus crash that leads to Michael’s escape is never revealed, though it is suggested that Sartain caused the accident in order to set his twisted plan into motion. Nothing is off the table as illustrated by Sartain’s stabbing of Officer Hawkins (Will Patton) to ensure Michael and Laurie have their long-awaited reunion.
Sartain is more than a plot contrivance. He’s the first touchpoint in Green’s trilogy that acknowledges the way Michael affects those around him. Sartain’s actions are the earliest indicator of how Green and his co-writers have reinvented Michael Myers. “Evil on two legs,” but also a virus. A corrupting influence that spreads through those who encounter him.
When Halloween Kills was released, audiences were taken aback by this direction, but it’s simply building off what has come before. First it was Sartain. Then, a lynch mob that starts with good (or at least protective) intentions before quickly spiraling into a mindless mass that culminates in the death of an innocent man.
The idea that Michael’s presence is akin to Pennywise in Stephen King’s IT in terms of how it affects Haddonfield is plain as day throughout.
I made the connection right off:
“He’s turning good people into monsters,” says (former) Sheriff Brackett and that’s what Green reminds us Michael does. Just as the presence of Pennywise created a host of terrible people in Derry, like the abusive fathers of Beverly and Henry, so too does The Shape’s continued murders conjure other bastions of evil, all of them impacting the town in different ways.
The lynch mob is doomed to fail. Just as Laurie would’ve failed had she continued to pursue her vengeance. But she learns instead that The Shape’s bloodlust has nothing to do with her. She discovers that Officer Hawkins has his own forty year history with Michael Myers, and it’s every bit as personal. It’s why Halloween Kills opens with an extended flashback showcasing his trauma while in the present Hawkins clings to life, swearing vengeance as if that need is the only thing keeping him alive.
Laurie learns she isn’t special when it comes to Michael. Her history with The Shape is nothing personal. Everyone who encounters him is marked by the experience. It either destroys you—as it destroyed Sartain and the mob—or you can learn to live in spite of it.
If Halloween Kills is the zoomed-out, sprawling depiction of a town swallowed whole by its demons, then Halloween Ends is both the logical next step as well as the opposite one. It’s an examination of Michael’s legacy, how his evil has reshaped Haddonfield and how his corruption takes hold of others.
We see how the events of Halloween Night 2018 linger one year later (Halloween Ends opens in 2019) giving us a quick montage of how the town is coping (or isn’t). Grief-stricken suicides. The aftermath of a violent lovers’ spat. Paranoia around every corner. Michael may be “gone” (e.g. nearly dead and catatonic in a storm drain) but his presence is on every street corner.
That “presence” is felt in the opening of Ends when our all-American Boy Corey Cunningham shows up to babysit. The kid he’s watching has continued nightmares of The Shape and while we’re certain Michael is going to interrupt this party, he doesn’t. Before the night is over, the child is dead and Corey’s life is altered. But Michael, it turns out, had nothing to do with it.
The movie skips ahead to 2022 and all the nervous energy around Michael Myers hasn’t disappeared, but mutated. Corey is now a pariah, the beneficiary of Haddonfield’s hatred. Since Michael has vanished and the town has nowhere to direct its negativity, it lands on Corey. The town trades one boogeyman for another. It seemingly needs one in order justify its dire condition.
In Halloween Ends, Haddonfield feels mean, stagnant, run down. There are of course good people living here, but we don’t spend much time with them. Halloween Ends is primarily shown from Corey’s point of view and, as such, it showcases a more hostile and unpleasant place than is often depicted in these movies (excluding Rob Zombie’s hellbilly duo, of course).
The people in Corey’s life are mostly terrible. Whether that’s his verbally abusive mother (right out of Carrie) or the band geek bullies who’re always harassing him, he can’t seem to find a moment’s peace, oddly shown through his inability to enjoy a glass of chocolate milk twice throughout—gotta love Green and his idiosyncratic touches!
Corey’s life changes when Laurie intervenes in a nasty bullying incident involving said band geeks and, sympathetic to his plight (not even Laurie is immune to taking blame for Haddonfield’s bloody past), decides to help the young man out.
She introduces Corey to her granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), whose own existence is quite miserable these days, circling the romantic drain and being passed over for promotion at work. Corey is the pariah, but the Strode women have their own boogeyman baggage.
They’re all living in the shadow of The Shape.
Laurie has come to terms with this, channelling her newfound philosophies into a tell-all memoir while reestablishing human connection with an erstwhile crush, Officer Hawkins (Curtis and Patton’s chemistry being so strong you wish these two had more scenes together).
Allyson, on the other hand, struggles to locate herself after losing both parents to her grandmother’s boogeyman. She’s desperate to leave Haddonfield, and yet is anchored there out of a sense of obligation to her grandmother.
Something Completely Different
Misery loves company, and Michael Myers becomes the glue that binds Allyson and Corey. Corey does point out that the world sees her as the strong survivor while he’s incorrectly branded a child killer and one wonders if Green isn’t commenting on the most lowly aspect of our current cultural moment: A world that’s eager to strip away the whole of a person’s worth because of something in their past.
There’s even something to be said for Corey’s tormentors being band dorks. Kids who in any other era of movies would’ve been the tormented. Here, they’re tormentors and perhaps another signifier that Green is using Halloween to carve up our modern moment.
He’s also bolted The Shape to the core of a romantic Halloween movie. I don’t think anyone other than Green would’ve attempted this, let alone pulled it off. In hindsight, his earlier small town dramas proved there was no one more suited to take the reins of a franchise where a small town is such an integral character.
Whether we’re talking about the womanizer learns to love aspect of All the Real Girls or the badly damaged characters of Snow Angels yearning for connection, you can see shades of this trilogy in his past work and it makes sense that Green is able to navigate these waters so richly.
None of this would’ve worked had Green and his team not demonstrated an incredible reverence for not just the original Halloween but for the entire forty year cinematic canon. Their passion and enthusiasm cannot be faked. To put it into 21st century online vernacular: David Gordon Green understood the assignment.
I did a blog on Green’s unique approach to these sequels following the release of Halloween Kills if you missed it.
But Green is keenly aware of the reaction Halloween Ends was going to inspire. He tips his hand from the very start by choosing the infamous Halloween III credit font to open his movie and it’s hysterical. Geeky shorthand for “We know people aren’t going to like this.”
Not at first.
Anyway, Allyson might’ve been Corey’s salvation. Their relationship begins rather positively, Corey finding more confidence and self-worth while Allyson finally has partner who understands her. I mean, they are a cute couple:
But this is still a Halloween movie, and Corey has to encounter The Shape. When he does, Michael sees his own darkness reflected in Corey’s eyes. And Michael, it turns out, is greatly diminished and seemingly dying. Probably from the injuries sustained by the previous film’s lynch mob if we’re taking things literally. Figuratively, though, it’s because Laurie, Allyson et. all have denied him his power by getting on with their lives.
Turns out, the only way to beat the boogeyman is to stop looking for him underneath your bed.
The Shape allows Corey to live, recognizing his potential. This isn’t a moment of mercy but self-preservation. The Shape ensuring that his brand of darkness is preserved. Michael’s “best” days are behind him, but the chaos and carnage he creates do not have to be.
Immediately following this encounter, Corey accidentally kills a belligerent homeless man and with this exchange, the rubicon is crossed. Corey’s fate is altered once again by unintended bloodshed. Only this time it brings the revelation that every obstacle in his life can be swept aside with murder and Halloween Ends is suddenly asking the question: Did Corey always have this evil inside of him, or was it the product of Michael’s twisted environment that shaped him to be this way?
Conflicted Corey
Corey gets on with killing, and his initial targets are those that are creating the most strife for Allyson. First he targets her ex-boyfriend, a smarmy police officer, by luring him to the storm drain and allowing The Shape to do his thing. Corey gets a charge out of this and then targets Allyson’s unscrupulous boss in the film’s most polarizing moment: Corey and The Shape embarking on a double murder.
Do they really? I’m not convinced Michael is actually in this scene at all. It feels closer to a Fight Club mechanic—the duality inside of Corey. The attack on the doctor and nurse is Corey’s first premeditated killing. Sure, he probably knew what would happen to the cop by luring him to the sewer, but this time out he wears his own Halloween mask to signify his evil transformation. And when The Shape does come bursting out of nowhere to slaughter the nurse—who just so happens to be Allyson’s work nemesis—it’s a visual indication that Corey has “leveled up.” That there’s a new Shape in town.
It’s not the only time Corey hallucinates.
Even though he’s a murderer now, Corey isn’t entirely gone yet. He’s shaken by his bloody actions and retreats to the now-abandoned house from the opening accident, sleeping on the floor in the spot where the young boy fell to his death. An indicator that he is still remorseful over what happened.
Upon waking up, he’s assailed by a belligerent Laurie who for some reason throws a paper airplane at him. The same paper airplane that the ill-fated child tossed in the prologue. It’s how we know Laurie isn’t really in the house. Well, that and because she doesn’t so much as exit the scene as abruptly vanish. A more overt cue that reveals this is all about externalizing Corey’s torment.
Hallucination Laurie tells Corey about the evil festering inside of him, explaining that it’s more dangerous than Michael because it spreads like an infection. Corey pushes back, defending his bloody actions by suggesting that Laurie should’ve followed this same path and succumbed to the darkness. What Corey doesn’t understand is that Laurie did succumb and the 2018 film that finds her living in isolation—and as a shell of a human being—is precisely how Michael’s darkness impacted her.
This moment reestablishes Laure’s choice at the end of Kills / start of Ends as a heroic one. Laurie took herself out of the fight because it’s the only way to win. Corey, on the other hand, cannot defeat the evil inside himself. It’s too overwhelming. In Corey, we have an example of what would’ve happened to Laurie had she embraced the darkness and decided to stay the course to keep fighting.
Corey’s “infection” continues to spread. The darkness feels good, makes him feel powerful for the first time. It’s why he feels entitled to Michael’s mask and why just a few scenes after this hallucinatory sparring match, he’s taking it off The Shape’s face. “You’re just a man in a Halloween mask.” The evil is inside of someone else now, about to pick up where Michael left off.
As I said previously, Corey is not the villain of Halloween Ends. He’s the culminating victim of this trilogy and the entire franchise. All of Haddonfield’s residual hatred soaking into him like a sponge, forging a self-fulfilling prophecy: Corey becoming the thing everyone believed he was.
Laurie Blossoms
It’s from this angle that the movie finds one of the best uses for Laurie Strode. And I do believe that “sidelining” her in Halloween Kills was the right play. She had to be rendered a helpless witness to the carnage in order to realize the fool’s errand she was running.
Halloween Ends finds her inching closer to Dr. Loomis territory, recognizing the evil inside of Corey before long, even when nobody else will listen to reason. It’s fun watching Laurie continue to evolve, not into a social outcast gunslinger this time, but into a modernized Van Helsing. A world-weary expert who understands this evil better than anyone (who can still kick a little ass when needed).
The Halloween movies work best when Michael has a foil. A nemesis. For years it was the great Donald Pleasence, whose Dr. Loomis got more frantic as the franchise wore on, but in these latest films Curtis has filled those shoes rather aptly and it’s been a joy to watch Laurie evolve so wonderfully and unexpectedly.
In the end, Corey kills himself in one final act of black-hearted spitefulness. His intent to drive a permanent wedge between Laurie and Allyson. Following this, Michael reappears to reclaim his mantle like a tired workman. Corey is gone and so somebody has to do it. Laurie engages in this fight but her demons are thoroughly exorcised, and that’s why she’s able to exterminate the Shape.
She’s already conquered him.
Because of this, their final battle is a formality, Michael as nothing more than a tired old man.
And following this one final night of violence, we end on Laurie sitting rather peacefully on the front steps of her home. She isn’t thinking any more about vengeance or survival, but cherry blossoms. Flowers from Japan, which are considered “a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of life” (according to Wikipedia).
Our physical existence is mercilessly brief at best, even without The Shape doing his thing. For the first time since being a teenager, Laurie is able to think about a normal life. And while she is beyond Michael at last, that pale white mask remains. Crumpled on a table inside her home. Empty. For now. But perhaps waiting for another Corey to come along and wear it.
“Because evil doesn’t die. It changes shape.”
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I'm glad this was written since it was an enjoyable conclusion that received unwarranted criticism.
Thanks for the good read. Well done horror movies have such underappreciated substance.